To turn Google Personal Results off permanently, so that you don't have to click "Hide personal results" every time you search, go into your Search settings. This is accessed by clicking on the cog in the upper-right:



Continue reading...

Section targeting is used to help make your Google Adsense ads more relevant to your content, and in turn improve your clickthrough rate (CTR). To target a section of your site, simply surround it with these HTML comments:



Continue reading...

This is a question I had but could not find the answer to. Google Adsense for Content (regular ad boxes) all have an ID that is in the embed code, allowing you to identify what ad block corresponds to what ad in your My Ads page (if you have bad naming conventions like I did). But Adsense for Search units do not have this. They list an ID, but that ID is not in the embed code anywhere. After some messing around I quickly found that there is a unique ID in each "Search box code" for each search ad unit. It comes after a colon after the partner id in the "cx" input. It looks like this:

Continue reading...

In case you aren't acquainted with these new features, here is a brief rundown on them. Skip to the bottom to just read how to disable them.

With Instant Search, Google starts searching as soon as you start typing into Google's search box. Think of it like auto-complete taken to the next level. This increases bandwidth usage and can be very annoying for fast typists searching for specific queries, since Google will make additional, irrelevant searches while you're typing. Combined with the search query input box taking focus when entering a new search page, any stray keyboard hits will immediately change your search results.

With Instant Preview, Google shows you thumbnails of web sites right in the search results, so you can see it without having to visit it. It used to be you had to click the Magnifying Glass next to a result to show it, but Google has recently changed it so that any click anywhere in the search body will bring up the preview. This is doubly annoying when you're only clicking to bring focus back to that browser window or to deselect some highlighted text (experienced computer users tend to make lots of "extra" clicks as well).


Continue reading...

Has the status of one of your Google AdWords ads been "Under Review" for more than a few days? Google states that they review ads in the order they're received, and work to review ads as quickly as possible. However, if your ad has been Under Review for a long period of time, it may be bugged or stuck and may remain that way. This happened to one of my ads, which had been under review for almost 2 weeks. I tried editing it and recreating it, but it would continue to sit Under Review.

Continue reading...

As if Twitter forcing politicians to communicate with poor grammar and spelling wasn't bad enough, you may also be inundated by "tweets", interlaced with search results, while searching Google. Google announced it in their blog in October of last year, though this site wasn't around then for me to comment on it. The tweets are usually in a live feed that is somewhere in the top handful of results, and they are often intermixed with links to news articles about your query. It is most often trendy searches or hot topics that bring results back containing Twitter feeds.

Continue reading...